I worked in men’s clothing for quite a while, and I have an anecdote to report about customers self-assessing their size and cut. If you sell people what they a

I worked in men’s clothing for quite a while, and I have an anecdote to report about customers self-assessing their size and cut. If you sell people what they ask for, they will hate you for it. In my day, off-the-rack shirts came in a collar size, an arm length, and there were three cuts: tailored or “european,” standard, and “full,” for the pear-shaped gentleman. People sized themselves at least an inch too small on the collar, and would woefully under-report their arm length too. The problem, of course, was that as you gain weight, your neck grows in girth and you need a larger collar. What about the arm length? Well, that’s measured from the nape of the neck to the wrist. As you gain weight, you gain fat and/or muscle around your shoulders and upper arm, and that can increase the measured length of the arm, even though your skeleton remains the same. Customers would ask for a shirt in the size they wanted their neck to be, and if you sold it to them, they’s squeeze into it, there’s be an unsightly bulge, and they would decide that your shirts were unflattering. One of the tricks in those days was to report that a particular shirt’s measurement was more accurate in metric, so if the customer didn’t mind, could I take a metric measurement... And I would sell them the correctly sized shirt. Although it was larger than they requested, it would look better because it fit properly, and they would see a thinner, fitter person in the mirror. Needless to say, the exact same thing was true in the cut of the shirt. The endomorphs would ask for a standard, and the standards would ask for the tailored cut. And then they’d hate the shirt. The best thing was to report that this particular manufacturer was off on their sizing, and just hand them the short that you could eyeball was right for them. They’d be back for more. So where were we? Oh yes, you absolutely cannot rely on people self-selecting their body type. The best thing is to measure.